Helicopter Pilot Films GIANT SASQUATCH with a Hiker – Bigfoot Encounter Story

he first time I watched the footage back in my office, I kept telling myself I’d find the trick in it.

A weird shadow. A bear standing wrong. A hiker in a costume with stilts. Anything that would let my brain crawl back into the safe little box labeled known wildlife and human nonsense. But the longer I stared at the screen, the more the truth settled in with the stubborn calm of gravity.

It wasn’t a trick.

It looked up at us.

And it raised its hand.

Not a swat. Not a scratch. Not a flinch.

A wave—slow, deliberate, unmistakably meant for the two people hovering above it in a state helicopter.

I’m writing this now because that gesture has never stopped echoing through my thoughts. It rewired how I see the mountains I’ve spent my adult life protecting. It changed the meaning of “remote.” It made me wonder how many times I’d flown over lives hidden in the canopy—lives that heard the rotor-thrum coming and chose, every time, to remain a rumor.

That day in November, one of them decided not to.

1) The Job: Eyes in the Sky

I work for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. I’ve been there six years, long enough for the job to stop feeling like an adventure and start feeling like responsibility.

My role isn’t glamorous. I’m not rappelling into ravines or wrestling chainsaws out of villains’ hands. I fly patrols over protected areas, looking for environmental damage and illegal operations—mostly unauthorized logging. Old-growth stands. Riparian buffers. Places that are supposed to remain intact because they’re valuable in every way profit can’t measure.

People still try. Always.

Some do it with massive equipment and the confidence of entitlement. Others do it like thieves—quiet, fast, early, hoping nobody notices. But from the air, especially after snowfall, they might as well paint arrows on the ground.

Snow is an honest witness. It shows you where trucks shouldn’t be. It outlines tracks like a confession. It makes a clearcut look like a bruise on skin.

Most patrols are routine:

Fly the grid.
Spot anomalies.
Document thoroughly.
Record GPS coordinates.
File reports that can hold up when enforcement gets involved.

Sometimes we catch active operations. More often we find the aftermath: fresh stumps, tracks, newly carved access routes, and the ugly geometry of human greed.

I love flying. I got my pilot’s license right after college and scraped my way into helicopter training with odd jobs and stubbornness. There’s something about being up there—seeing ridge after ridge fold into the distance—that makes me feel small in a way I actually like. The Cascades look endless from above, like the mountains are quietly refusing to be fully owned by maps.

That November morning started like any other.

And that’s the part that still gets me.

2) The Passenger: A Friend and a Favor

A week earlier, we’d received reports of unauthorized tree cutting in a protected zone about sixty miles northeast of our regional headquarters. Old growth. Off-limits. If the report was accurate, it wasn’t a small violation; it was the kind that makes your stomach tighten even before you see it.

The forecast was perfect—clear skies, fresh snow overnight, cold but stable air. Ideal flying. Ideal visibility. Ideal for catching tracks and disturbances.

I also had a passenger that day.

An old buddy from high school—construction guy now, good head on his shoulders, enthusiastic about anything with engines. He’d been begging for years to ride along on a patrol flight, just to see the mountains from a helicopter, to see what my job actually looked like.

Regulations aren’t casual about passengers on official flights, but this one was routine enough that the higher-ups approved it. No classified work. No active enforcement action. Just a damage assessment run.

He showed up at the airfield around 8:30 with a grin so big it looked like it hurt. I tried to lower expectations.

“Most of what we’ll see is… trees,” I told him. “And maybe a stump if we’re lucky.”

He didn’t care. He’d never been in a helicopter. The idea of being in the air over the Cascades was enough.

We did preflight checks together. I walked him through safety protocols, seatbelt procedure, headset use, what not to touch, where not to lean. He asked questions about everything—gauges, controls, the way a helicopter feels alive even when it’s sitting still.

I’d forgotten what it was like to see it all through fresh eyes.

We lifted off around 9:30.

The air was crisp, maybe 35 degrees. Sky so clear it looked scrubbed. No haze. No clouds. The kind of day pilots dream about and hikers brag about.

As we leveled out and headed northeast, my buddy finally relaxed enough to breathe normally. He pressed his face toward the window like a kid at an aquarium—except the aquarium was an ocean of trees.

3) The Routine: Forest, Snow, and Stumps

We flew low for patrol work, roughly three to four hundred feet above the canopy. Low enough to pick out detail. High enough for safety and efficiency.

Below us, the Cascades rolled out in ridges and valleys, old growth broken by occasional permitted logging zones. Streams cut silver lines through white and green. Fresh snow dusted everything, softening the world into something almost too beautiful to be real.

About twenty minutes in, we passed a legal operation—clearly permitted, clearly bounded. Access roads where they belonged. Buffers around waterways. The kind of clean, regulated footprint you can recognize immediately when you’ve done this long enough.

I noted it and kept going.

We saw elk—eight, maybe ten—moving through a clearing, their backs dark against the snow. A few deer bedded down near a meadow edge, nearly invisible until we were overhead. My buddy took pictures with his phone like he was documenting a safari.

I did a radio check-in around 10:30. Base confirmed our position and told us to continue the grid pattern.

Everything felt normal.

And then, about ninety minutes into the flight, I saw the bruise.

A fresh clearing on a protected slope.

Dark exposed earth. Freshly cut wood. Several large trees down.

Even from the air, you could tell they weren’t small. These were old growth specimens—massive trunks, the kind that took a century just to decide what shape they wanted to be.

I circled for a better look and started documenting immediately with the department camera. High-quality zoom, stabilized, designed for exactly this work.

Truck tracks cut through the snow—crisp, recent. Probably within a day or two. Whoever did this had equipment and experience. Clean cuts, professional work. Not amateurs. Not kids with a chainsaw and bad judgment. This was deliberate.

I counted roughly fifteen to twenty felled trees.

Every one of them felt like a theft from the future.

My buddy, who works in construction and understands wood in a practical way, just stared down at the stumps like he couldn’t believe anyone would do this.

That’s when I noticed he’d gone quiet in a different way.

Not “wow, big trees” quiet.

More like “my brain just hit something it can’t categorize” quiet.

He pointed out the window.

“Hey,” he said, voice tightened. “What’s that person doing way out here?”

4) The Trail: A Lone Hiker in the Wrong Place

At first, I thought he meant one of the loggers. But the figure he pointed at wasn’t anywhere near the illegal clearing. It was about half a mile away on what looked like an old, barely visible trail—abandoned, half swallowed by brush.

I zoomed in.

A lone hiker in a gray jacket, wearing a large backpack, moving steadily along the trail.

That alone was odd. This wasn’t a casual day-hike area. It was miles from maintained trailheads and access points. The terrain was steep, remote, and unforgiving in November.

I was about to pan back to finish documenting the illegal site when something else slid into the frame behind the hiker.

Another figure.

Same trail.

About a hundred yards back.

I zoomed tighter.

My breath caught so hard it felt like my lungs forgot what they were for.

It was massive. Seven or eight feet tall, maybe more. Covered in dark hair—black or deep brown—head to toe. Walking upright with a fluid, natural bipedal stride that made “bear” a laughable thought.

The arms were long and swung with the motion like they belonged there. The shoulders were broad—inhumanly broad. The gait was different than a person’s: longer stride, heavier weight distribution, a rhythm that didn’t match human biomechanics but was undeniably comfortable in its own body.

My buddy whispered, over and over, as if repeating it could force reality back into shape:

“That’s not possible. That’s not possible.”

But it was.

Below us, the creature walked steadily, maintaining that consistent distance behind the hiker. Not rushing. Not crouching. Not stalking like a predator. Just… moving along the same trail with an unhurried pace, like it belonged there and time was something it had plenty of.

I adjusted our position, descended slightly, hovered as steady as I could. My hands were shaking—not enough to compromise flight safety, but enough that I noticed it and hated it. I kept filming, fighting to keep the camera stable while also controlling the aircraft.

For two or three minutes, we watched it walk.

The hiker in gray kept going, apparently unaware.

And then the creature stopped.

Right in the middle of the trail.

It stood perfectly still, like it was listening—not to the woods, but to the air above it.

Then it looked up.

Directly at us.

Through the zoom, I saw its eyes—dark, intelligent, aware in a way that made my skin go cold. Not the blank watchfulness of an animal reacting to noise, but active perception. Recognition. Thought.

And then, slowly, deliberately, it raised one arm.

High above its head.

A wave.

It held the gesture for three or four seconds. Long enough that there was no honest way to pretend it meant something else.

This wasn’t coincidence.

This wasn’t “maybe it was scratching.”

This was communication.

A message across distance:

I see you.

You see me.

We are both aware.

Then it lowered its arm, turned calmly, and stepped off the trail into dense forest.

Within seconds it was gone.

No crashing. No obvious disturbance. No frantic retreat.

Just vanished, as if the woods had opened for it and closed behind it.

My buddy and I stared at the empty trees below like we were waiting for reality to return and apologize.

Finally he asked, voice shaking:

“Did that just happen? Did we really just see that?”

I checked the camera.

We had it. About two minutes of clear footage, including the wave.

Crystal clear.

My stomach turned over—not from fear exactly, but from the weight of what that meant. Evidence isn’t just proof. Evidence is responsibility.

I scanned the forest for more signs.

Nothing.

The hiker in gray continued along the trail, unchanged, as if nothing extraordinary had just shared space with him.

I thought about trying to warn the hiker. But there was nowhere safe to land, and warn him about what? The creature had shown no aggression. The wave felt… almost courteous. Like it had acknowledged us and then left to restore boundaries.

So I did what my job demanded.

I returned to the illegal logging site and finished documenting the damage, even though my heart wasn’t in it anymore. My eyes kept drifting back toward where the creature had disappeared, as if my attention could pull it back into sight.

We headed back to base around 1:00 p.m.

The flight back was mostly silent. Every so often, one of us would break it with the same bewildered sentence, reshaped slightly:

“That happened, right?”

We landed, filed the official report on the illegal logging operation—detailed, professional, by the book. I didn’t mention the creature.

I like my job. I’d like to keep it.

After everyone left, I stayed behind at my desk and watched the footage again. And again. And again.

The wave never got less clear.

5) The Week After: Obsession and Coordinates

The next few days were a blur. I did my tasks, answered emails, flew other patrols, nodded at coworkers like a normal person.

But my mind stayed in that moment over the trail.

That wave.

The intentionality of it bothered me in a way I couldn’t explain. If it had wanted to avoid being seen, it could have. The helicopter noise would’ve warned it from miles away. It had time. It had terrain. It had concealment.

It chose visibility.

It chose acknowledgement.

I kept pulling up the GPS coordinates on mapping software. Studying satellite imagery. Learning the contours of that ridge line like it was a face I might recognize again.

And then there was the hiker in gray.

Why was he out there? How did he get there? Did he know? Was the creature following him—or accompanying him, as strange as that sounded?

After a week of mental spiraling, I decided I had to go back.

Not in a helicopter. On foot.

I needed to see the place from ground level. To understand how it moved, where it vanished, what the terrain felt like when you were standing inside it instead of looking down like a god.

I told my family I was taking a long day hike to clear my head.

Which was true, in the way that a lightning strike is “weather.”

6) The Hike: November Quiet and Old Growth Weight

The drive to the nearest access road took about three hours. I parked at a turnaround on an old logging road that looked like it hadn’t been used in decades. My GPS told me I had roughly six miles to hike to the sighting location—much of it cross-country through steep, rough terrain.

I left the truck around 7:00 a.m.

Cold morning, low twenties. Frost on everything. Breath coming out in thick clouds.

I had bear spray clipped to my belt, not because I expected to use it, but because going into remote country without it feels like tempting fate. Still, I had a strange intuition—quiet, persistent—that I wouldn’t need it.

The first two miles followed old roadbeds—overgrown but navigable.

Then the climb began.

The terrain steepened. The trail dissolved into suggestion. I relied on GPS and landmarks: rock formations, unusually large trees, the angle of ridges. I crossed a creek over slippery stones, water so cold it felt like it could fracture your bones by touch. I climbed over massive fallen logs, pushed through brush that grabbed at my clothes like it wanted to keep me.

The forest was incredibly quiet.

Not “pleasantly quiet.”

Quiet like a room after someone stops talking.

Wind moved high above, bird calls echoed occasionally, but there was a stillness underneath it all that made me feel like I’d stepped into a place that didn’t need me.

After about three and a half hours, I reached the ridgeline.

I recognized it immediately.

The shape of the slope. The way the trail cut along it. The density of trees.

This was the spot.

From ground level, it felt different—closed in, heavy, ancient. From the air it had looked like scenery. From the ground it felt like territory.

I walked slowly, scanning for any sign—disturbed snow, broken branches, impressions in softer soil.

And then I found them.

Tracks.

Massive footprints pressed deep into partially frozen ground. Partly filled with snow but still unmistakable. Eighteen inches long, maybe twenty. Five distinct toe impressions.

They were not “kinda like feet.” They were feet.

Whatever made them was heavy—extraordinarily heavy. The depth of the impressions told its own story.

I followed the tracks for about fifty yards until they hit rock and disappeared. I took photos from multiple angles, measured for scale with my hand, documented everything carefully like my job had trained me to do.

Then I sat on a fallen log to rest.

And I listened.

An hour passed. Then another.

No movement. No strange sounds. Just wind and occasional birds.

Yet I didn’t feel alone.

Not in a paranoid way. More like a quiet awareness—like being in a museum with unseen security cameras. A sense of presence held at distance.

I took out an apple and some trail mix and left them at the base of an ancient cedar.

Then, because the silence felt like it deserved acknowledgment, I said quietly:

“Thank you for letting us see you.”

It sounded ridiculous out loud. Like talking to a mountain.

But it also felt right.

Around 2:00 p.m., with daylight slipping and temperatures dropping, I started hiking back out. I didn’t want to be navigating this terrain after dark.

About a mile from my truck, the rough path joined a slightly more maintained trail.

And that’s when I saw another hiker coming toward me.

Gray jacket.

Large worn backpack.

My heart started pounding.

It was him.

The same hiker from the footage.

We approached each other with the usual trail courtesy—nods, small smiles.

“Good day for a hike,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied, trying to keep my voice steady. “Beautiful out here.”

We started to pass.

Then he stopped.

Turned to look at me more carefully, as if deciding whether I was safe to tell the truth to.

“Can I ask you something kind of strange?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Did you see anything unusual up there?”

My first instinct was to deny everything. Reflex self-preservation.

But something in his eyes stopped me. He didn’t look like a man fishing for ghost stories. He looked like a man asking about weather—serious, practical, already expecting a real answer.

“Maybe,” I said carefully. “What do you mean by unusual?”

He smiled slightly, like he’d just heard confirmation.

“Did you happen to see a Bigfoot?”

The word sat in the cold air between us like a stone dropped into still water.

“Yes,” I said. “Tracks today. But also… several days ago. From a helicopter. I saw one out here.”

He nodded once.

“Then you saw me,” he said calmly. “I’m the hiker.”

We stepped off the trail onto a flatter patch where we could talk.

He told me he’d been hiking these mountains for over forty years. He’d seen them—the creatures—many times.

“Them?” I interrupted.

“At least three individuals in this general area that I know of,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Possibly more.”

The specific one from my footage, he said, he’d encountered semi-regularly for about five years. A few times a year, their paths crossed. The creature kept its distance. He kept his.

“Following isn’t really the right word,” he added. “It’s more like… we’re on the same trail at the same time.”

He spoke about the creature with a kind of calm respect that made it hard to argue with my own senses.

“You outsiders,” he said gently—not cruel, just factual—“you make them into monsters. Predators.”

He shook his head.

“He’s not a predator. Not even slightly. I’ve watched him gather berries, dig roots, catch fish with his hands. Never once have I seen him hunt anything the way people imagine.”

“Then why stay near people?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s attraction. I think it’s tolerance. Awareness. And maybe sometimes… curiosity.”

I asked if he’d ever tried to get closer.

“Once,” he said, with a small, embarrassed smile. “Years ago. He made it clear it wasn’t welcome—no aggression, no violence. Just distance. So I learned the boundary.”

Now, he said, when they encounter each other, it’s a pause. A look. A mutual acknowledgement. Then both continue.

“That’s what respect looks like out here,” he said.

Then he looked at me seriously.

“Did you tell anyone else about what you saw from that helicopter?”

“Just my friend who was with me,” I admitted. “No one else.”

“Good,” he said, and the approval in his voice was unmistakable. “Please keep it that way.”

He explained it plainly: if people heard about this—especially with footage—they’d come. Cameras. Hunters. “Researchers.” People who treat living beings like a prize.

“These creatures have survived because they stayed hidden,” he said. “They don’t need to be proven. They don’t need attention. They need privacy.”

I told him about the wave.

He smiled warmly.

“He’s done that to me too,” he said. “It means: I see you. You see me. Everything is fine.”

He believed the creature had heard helicopters before. Understood what they were. And that day, it wanted us to know—clearly—that it was aware of being watched.

“That’s a privilege,” he said. “Most people never get direct acknowledgement.”

We talked for another thirty minutes as afternoon light thinned. He mentioned shelters sometimes—crude lean-tos of branches and bark, signs you’d miss unless you knew what you were looking for.

But he emphasized how invisible they could be when they chose to be.

“They know every inch of these mountains,” he said. “We’re visitors. They’re residents.”

Before he continued on his way, he paused one last time.

“Enjoy what you saw,” he said. “But leave it alone. They’ve earned their privacy.”

Then he walked on, disappearing around the bend like he’d just given me directions to a trailhead, not a philosophy about another intelligent species living quietly in the forest.

7) The Drive Home: Two Kinds of Damage

I hiked back to my truck feeling like the world had shifted a few degrees off its axis.

The illegal logging site flashed through my mind—the stumps, the tracks, the carved scars.

Humans cutting down century-old trees for profit.

And somewhere nearby, an intelligent being that asked for nothing except to be left alone.

The contrast hit me hard.

I still have the footage saved. I’ve watched it more times than I’ll admit. The wave is always the moment that pulls my breath short—the calm certainty of it, the absence of fear, the deliberate choice to acknowledge.

I haven’t shown it to anyone besides my buddy who was there.

Not because I doubt what it is.

Because I believe the old hiker was right.

Some mysteries aren’t puzzles.

Some boundaries aren’t challenges.

Sometimes the most ethical thing you can do with the truth is protect it—not because it’s fragile, but because what it protects is.

So I keep doing my job.

I fly patrols. I document damage. I help protect the forest that holds more life than most people can imagine.

And when the Cascades stretch out below me—ridge after ridge, ancient and indifferent—I sometimes find myself scanning trails that cut thin lines through the trees.

Not looking to catch a glimpse.

Just remembering that somewhere down there, beneath the canopy, a being once looked up at a helicopter and waved like it was the most normal thing in the world.

We see each other.

We understand each other.

And then we go our separate ways.